Folks need to use Rivest's Package Transform (i.e., all-or-nothing encryption). This increases the difficulty by forcing a cryptanalyst to decrypt an entire (multi-block) message instead of just individual blocks, before looking for plaintext.
"Despite the 'human-like' use of hierarchical syntax to communicate, Suzuki and his colleagues found that whale songs convey less than one bit of information per second. By comparison, humans speaking English generate 10 bits of information for each word spoken."
They used an information-theoretic approach, since the songs can't yet be decoded with any certainty. Given that we can speak several words a second, our rate of communication would seem to be much higher.
Dolphins have a higher percentage of glial cells in their brains to keep them functioning in colder temperatures. Those cells don't contribute as much (if at all) to cognition. So size has less to do with intelligence than most think.
Also, studies of the variety and rate of sounds produced by dolphins/whales/etc., show that while complex, their communications convey information at a lower rate even than human speech.
Good enough for me. (Unless someone can show me that they've been publishing studies that show the opposite...)
That assumes a linear, left-to-right path through the data. I do something similar, but I skip letters, go backwards and diagonally, take a "knight's tour" in a particular direction, etc., for different passwords. Still not an astronomical number of possibilities, but a few orders of magnitude better.
They will rail against the fact that, since we didn't actually directly observe the one time it happened (in Earth's history), we can't know with 100% certainty that it happened _that_ way. Maybe it happened in the second or third most likely way that it could have happened...who knows for sure?
(And if we're trying to find out what the universe is populated with life-wise, it will be pretty hard to learn much from a sample size of 1...)
I hear variations on this argument all the time: "Given an infinite amount of time, anything will happen at least once." Frequently, people tack on the calculation "infinity * vanishingly small probability => a darned good chance of it happening." (I paraphrase slightly.)
This calculation is bogus, as is the glib argument. There's only so much time from big bang to heat death, and it is not infinite. Various people have calculated upper limits on the number of atoms in the universe, the upper limit on how many atomic interactions there could be, etc., etc. These numbers are large, but if we want any ability to discriminate among competing theories, we have to be able to assign likelihoods to these kinds of events. Handwaving arguments are darned hard to compare with each other.
...science isn't about killing religion, science couldn't care less what the religious implications of its discoveries are.
You should tell this to Richard Dawkins.
Actually science is defined by flawed human beings, carried on by them, and it concludes what they want it to conclude at the time. The way we define "science" sure sounds great in the abstract form, but it is conducted by real people who want to keep their jobs, pay their bills, and go home so they can enjoy life like the rest of us. I know modern science is, as they say, "the best that we have come up with so far," but sometimes it sounds as if science itself is a religion (because lay persons are supposed to trust it blindly), and scientists are its "priests"...
Well, I have not met any road-rage instigators out on the pavement to find out. If you have, then maybe I'm wrong. But it still seems that people bend over backwards to justify the traditional psychological belief that bullies come from a position of weakness. It's a very entrenched idea that makes real cowards feel better about the bullies in their lives, by shrinking them down to size. Here's the thing: If weakness is at a bully's _core_, where does the ability to act brave come from? Faked? Faked bravery is easy to spot, and so isn't worth much in a confrontation. I still find this explanation hard to believe.
I know a family that has narcissism running through it. They have just plain bullies, and some convicted criminals over 3 generations. Question them even in the slightest way, and it will be taken as a threat, and they don't back down once challenged. Some of the jail time has been for physical violence, so they're not afraid of escalating things.
It would seem that the true cowards are those that try to avoid conflict (as victim, but especially as instigator) at any cost. Those with a hyper-sensitive ego and/or narcissism are somehow a different breed. All I'd ask is that folks check out the article I referenced...
How about teaching them something they won't get anyplace else (including public schools): basic reasoning skills, plus how to spot fallacious arguments. I know it's not as exciting, but the world sorely needs more people who can think rationally.
To me, bullies on the road are no different in principle. They are cowards, and as such they put themselves in positions where they can hassle others with little fear of harm to themselves.
They are not cowards, but you do have it half right: they are bullies. But like criminals, they are actually narcissists, people with a pathologically-high self-esteem. They think they do have the right to boss other drivers around.
For quite a while, shrinks have been telling us that bullies are those with a very low self-esteem, who do what they do in order to bolster their self-image. It makes more sense to me (and to this researcher: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=violent-pride) that this cannot be, as someone with a very low self-esteem lacks the necessary aggressiveness to act as bullies do. The linked article points out that criminals and bullies rate high on tests for narcissism.
The whole thing is rather disconcerting as we seem to be developing better ways to kill just as quickly as all our other tech is advancing but I don't see leaps in our ability to live peacefully or get along keeping up with it all.
From thrown rocks to nukes, this has been the case, and always will be. Entropy guarantees that it's always easier to destroy something than it was to make it. And it only takes one person who wants to destroy to start leading others down that path...
This has been known for quite a while, with one pair of researchers speculating about how much time the average person would need, with a tool's assistance, to sufficiently hide their identity. A change of 14 words out of 1000 was sufficient to hide their identity pretty well against word-level attacks.
It is something of a cat-and-mouse game, for as stylometric analyses become more sophisticated, so will the techniques of obfuscation. However, as more of one's personal style is "blurred", the more likely it is that other as of yet undetected patterns will get swept along in the document alterations. In the end, obfuscation must win.
...and it's still getting better.
Two biggest marriage killers: Selfishness and immaturity.
Advice: Don't go into marriage just for fun or sex. It has to be based on something deeper than that, because there's always someone else out there who is more fun than you are. Make sure you have life goals in common (children, e.g.) Make sure your beliefs are shared. There's nothing worse than arguing over how to spend money, what political campaigns you are going to donate to, what causes you support, etc. Those are fundamental issues, and you don't want to marry someone with whom you don't share your core beliefs.
Marriage is a commitment, not just an extended dating relationship. (You know how tenuous any dating relationship is.) Nothing sucks the wind out of a marriage like the feeling that you could "break up" any day. Marriage was meant to be more than that.
Once we (someday) achieve this, the only problem will be that evolution will once again take over, and it will be a 'survival of the fittest' type of competition for limited resources (e- energy?). The only difference will be that mutations, reproduction, competition, and death will take place in millisecond timescales instead of days/years. It's the fate of anything that lives.
In short, I see no reason whatsoever to expect that machine intelligence will be more beneficent than we are, as they are sometimes portrayed in the movies. That's just utopian science fiction.
Technically, Occam's Razor is not a rule of deductive reasoning, nor does it even allow one to assess probabilities. It's just a guideline for which explanation to prefer in the absence of any additional information.
>One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
A true freedom fighter is fighting to establish a free society of some sort. A terrorist is fighting to (re-)establish a tyranny. Huge difference. I'd prefer we not equate the two.
So they didn't go back to the real beginning, which was the publishing by H. J. Round of the discovery that a silicon crystal would emit light when a current was passed through it? The credit for first discovery needs to go to an Englishman, not a Soviet...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Round/
I figured that assertion was largely self-evident. The evolutionary system that brought us into existence includes competition for limited resources. Those that are best at taking (i.e., the selfish) are the most successful. (Yes, there is an entire debate that could be had over altruism within species, symbiosis, etc., but even within a gregarious species, there is almost always a pecking order. I consider altruism, et al, to be secondary to the main tendency of creatures.) We are a product of that system, and show no ability to change, nor even to learn from our mistakes.
In fact, human beings take this competition orders of magnitude farther than any other species I know of. We embark on formal programs to kill millions of our own kind, while simultaneously wasting energy that could be spent propagating our species. (When you're job is stuffing people of a different belief system into gas chambers and ovens, it takes time away from the wife and kiddos...)
If someone realizes that human nature is basically selfish (a fact guaranteed by evolution), and then ascertains that selfishness looks an awful lot like evil, a decision to go against the grain of one's own nature will be hard by definition.
Living one's life in a more difficult manner than absolutely necessary is not where the virtue arises, but rather from behaving less selfishly.
Coding style is totally subjective, hence discussing it is almost pointless. So I offer just a few (meta-)observations from 20 years in the trenches:
0. For senior developers, terse is still quite understandable, and hence "better". More stuff on the screen at one time = good. 1. For beginners just learning a language's idioms, or developers who aren't that bright, cut/paste is more understandable, hence "better". It may take up more space, but each line is more easily comprehended in isolation. (I have seen developers with 10+ years of experience, still coding heavily with cut/paste.) 2. If a team of headstrong people already use diverse styles, imposing a standard will create ill will. 3. For a team of easy-going, mature developers, a modest coding standard is welcomed. 4. Everyone will argue for the form they are most comfortable with, and that is totally subjective. Sure, we can cite nice sounding reasons for our preferences, but the opposition can do the same. (And is it always the case that the smartest carry the day?) 5. Yes, there are styles that are "way out there", but those coders won't speak up. They will just keep coding in their style, hoping nobody notices. 6. Until there is a way to measure the average cognitive effort required to understand a given style, relative to other styles, we may as well drop this debate and do something more useful with our time.
It all adds up to lost profits for some, and job security for others. Ain't life grand?
>The mistake of course is to assume that "We are alone!" is actually an explanation.
True. It is only an explanation for the deafening silence, not for how we got here. Interestingly, for much of the 20th century, people even expected our own solar system to be teeming with life...
If I'm not mistaken, I believe William of Occam was a theist, also.
Slashdot Mirror
Folks need to use Rivest's Package Transform (i.e., all-or-nothing encryption). This increases the difficulty by forcing a cryptanalyst to decrypt an entire (multi-block) message instead of just individual blocks, before looking for plaintext.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-or-nothing_transform
(Or just switch to AES...duh.)
Link is http://www.physorg.com/news11980.html; I was wrong though, it was the song of the humpback whale that they analyzed. From the article:
"Despite the 'human-like' use of hierarchical syntax to communicate, Suzuki and his colleagues found that whale songs convey less than one bit of information per second. By comparison, humans speaking English generate 10 bits of information for each word spoken."
They used an information-theoretic approach, since the songs can't yet be decoded with any certainty. Given that we can speak several words a second, our rate of communication would seem to be much higher.
Dolphins have a higher percentage of glial cells in their brains to keep them functioning in colder temperatures. Those cells don't contribute as much (if at all) to cognition. So size has less to do with intelligence than most think. Also, studies of the variety and rate of sounds produced by dolphins/whales/etc., show that while complex, their communications convey information at a lower rate even than human speech. Good enough for me. (Unless someone can show me that they've been publishing studies that show the opposite...)
that will rip a hole in subspace. I just know it.
That assumes a linear, left-to-right path through the data. I do something similar, but I skip letters, go backwards and diagonally, take a "knight's tour" in a particular direction, etc., for different passwords. Still not an astronomical number of possibilities, but a few orders of magnitude better.
They will rail against the fact that, since we didn't actually directly observe the one time it happened (in Earth's history), we can't know with 100% certainty that it happened _that_ way. Maybe it happened in the second or third most likely way that it could have happened...who knows for sure? (And if we're trying to find out what the universe is populated with life-wise, it will be pretty hard to learn much from a sample size of 1...)
This calculation is bogus, as is the glib argument. There's only so much time from big bang to heat death, and it is not infinite. Various people have calculated upper limits on the number of atoms in the universe, the upper limit on how many atomic interactions there could be, etc., etc. These numbers are large, but if we want any ability to discriminate among competing theories, we have to be able to assign likelihoods to these kinds of events. Handwaving arguments are darned hard to compare with each other.
...and are connected into your home's electrical system? I hope you plan on putting up a few lightning rods at the same time. Just a thought.
...science isn't about killing religion, science couldn't care less what the religious implications of its discoveries are.
You should tell this to Richard Dawkins.
Actually science is defined by flawed human beings, carried on by them, and it concludes what they want it to conclude at the time. The way we define "science" sure sounds great in the abstract form, but it is conducted by real people who want to keep their jobs, pay their bills, and go home so they can enjoy life like the rest of us. I know modern science is, as they say, "the best that we have come up with so far," but sometimes it sounds as if science itself is a religion (because lay persons are supposed to trust it blindly), and scientists are its "priests"...
Well, I have not met any road-rage instigators out on the pavement to find out. If you have, then maybe I'm wrong. But it still seems that people bend over backwards to justify the traditional psychological belief that bullies come from a position of weakness. It's a very entrenched idea that makes real cowards feel better about the bullies in their lives, by shrinking them down to size. Here's the thing: If weakness is at a bully's _core_, where does the ability to act brave come from? Faked? Faked bravery is easy to spot, and so isn't worth much in a confrontation. I still find this explanation hard to believe.
I know a family that has narcissism running through it. They have just plain bullies, and some convicted criminals over 3 generations. Question them even in the slightest way, and it will be taken as a threat, and they don't back down once challenged. Some of the jail time has been for physical violence, so they're not afraid of escalating things.
It would seem that the true cowards are those that try to avoid conflict (as victim, but especially as instigator) at any cost. Those with a hyper-sensitive ego and/or narcissism are somehow a different breed. All I'd ask is that folks check out the article I referenced...
How about teaching them something they won't get anyplace else (including public schools): basic reasoning skills, plus how to spot fallacious arguments. I know it's not as exciting, but the world sorely needs more people who can think rationally.
They are not cowards, but you do have it half right: they are bullies. But like criminals, they are actually narcissists, people with a pathologically-high self-esteem. They think they do have the right to boss other drivers around.
For quite a while, shrinks have been telling us that bullies are those with a very low self-esteem, who do what they do in order to bolster their self-image. It makes more sense to me (and to this researcher: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=violent-pride) that this cannot be, as someone with a very low self-esteem lacks the necessary aggressiveness to act as bullies do. The linked article points out that criminals and bullies rate high on tests for narcissism.
The whole thing is rather disconcerting as we seem to be developing better ways to kill just as quickly as all our other tech is advancing but I don't see leaps in our ability to live peacefully or get along keeping up with it all.
From thrown rocks to nukes, this has been the case, and always will be. Entropy guarantees that it's always easier to destroy something than it was to make it. And it only takes one person who wants to destroy to start leading others down that path...
This has been known for quite a while, with one pair of researchers speculating about how much time the average person would need, with a tool's assistance, to sufficiently hide their identity. A change of 14 words out of 1000 was sufficient to hide their identity pretty well against word-level attacks.
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=69343
It is something of a cat-and-mouse game, for as stylometric analyses become more sophisticated, so will the techniques of obfuscation. However, as more of one's personal style is "blurred", the more likely it is that other as of yet undetected patterns will get swept along in the document alterations. In the end, obfuscation must win.
...and it's still getting better. Two biggest marriage killers: Selfishness and immaturity. Advice: Don't go into marriage just for fun or sex. It has to be based on something deeper than that, because there's always someone else out there who is more fun than you are. Make sure you have life goals in common (children, e.g.) Make sure your beliefs are shared. There's nothing worse than arguing over how to spend money, what political campaigns you are going to donate to, what causes you support, etc. Those are fundamental issues, and you don't want to marry someone with whom you don't share your core beliefs. Marriage is a commitment, not just an extended dating relationship. (You know how tenuous any dating relationship is.) Nothing sucks the wind out of a marriage like the feeling that you could "break up" any day. Marriage was meant to be more than that.
Once we (someday) achieve this, the only problem will be that evolution will once again take over, and it will be a 'survival of the fittest' type of competition for limited resources (e- energy?). The only difference will be that mutations, reproduction, competition, and death will take place in millisecond timescales instead of days/years. It's the fate of anything that lives. In short, I see no reason whatsoever to expect that machine intelligence will be more beneficent than we are, as they are sometimes portrayed in the movies. That's just utopian science fiction.
What happened??? Did he accidentally wander into a room full of children?
Technically, Occam's Razor is not a rule of deductive reasoning, nor does it even allow one to assess probabilities. It's just a guideline for which explanation to prefer in the absence of any additional information.
>One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
A true freedom fighter is fighting to establish a free society of some sort. A terrorist is fighting to (re-)establish a tyranny. Huge difference. I'd prefer we not equate the two.
So they didn't go back to the real beginning, which was the publishing by H. J. Round of the discovery that a silicon crystal would emit light when a current was passed through it? The credit for first discovery needs to go to an Englishman, not a Soviet... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._J._Round/
Non-photoshopped Bart Simpson, mowed into a farmer's field near some property that used to be in the family...
http://terraserver-usa.com/image.aspx?T=1&S=10&Z=15&X=1711&Y=22050&W=2&qs=%7CSt.+Joseph%7CMO%7C/
I figured that assertion was largely self-evident. The evolutionary system that brought us into existence includes competition for limited resources. Those that are best at taking (i.e., the selfish) are the most successful. (Yes, there is an entire debate that could be had over altruism within species, symbiosis, etc., but even within a gregarious species, there is almost always a pecking order. I consider altruism, et al, to be secondary to the main tendency of creatures.) We are a product of that system, and show no ability to change, nor even to learn from our mistakes.
In fact, human beings take this competition orders of magnitude farther than any other species I know of. We embark on formal programs to kill millions of our own kind, while simultaneously wasting energy that could be spent propagating our species. (When you're job is stuffing people of a different belief system into gas chambers and ovens, it takes time away from the wife and kiddos...)
If someone realizes that human nature is basically selfish (a fact guaranteed by evolution), and then ascertains that selfishness looks an awful lot like evil, a decision to go against the grain of one's own nature will be hard by definition.
Living one's life in a more difficult manner than absolutely necessary is not where the virtue arises, but rather from behaving less selfishly.
Coding style is totally subjective, hence discussing it is almost pointless. So I offer just a few (meta-)observations from 20 years in the trenches:
0. For senior developers, terse is still quite understandable, and hence "better". More stuff on the screen at one time = good.
1. For beginners just learning a language's idioms, or developers who aren't that bright, cut/paste is more understandable, hence "better". It may take up more space, but each line is more easily comprehended in isolation. (I have seen developers with 10+ years of experience, still coding heavily with cut/paste.)
2. If a team of headstrong people already use diverse styles, imposing a standard will create ill will.
3. For a team of easy-going, mature developers, a modest coding standard is welcomed.
4. Everyone will argue for the form they are most comfortable with, and that is totally subjective. Sure, we can cite nice sounding reasons for our preferences, but the opposition can do the same. (And is it always the case that the smartest carry the day?)
5. Yes, there are styles that are "way out there", but those coders won't speak up. They will just keep coding in their style, hoping nobody notices.
6. Until there is a way to measure the average cognitive effort required to understand a given style, relative to other styles, we may as well drop this debate and do something more useful with our time.
It all adds up to lost profits for some, and job security for others. Ain't life grand?
>The mistake of course is to assume that "We are alone!" is actually an explanation.
True. It is only an explanation for the deafening silence, not for how we got here. Interestingly, for much of the 20th century, people even expected our own solar system to be teeming with life...
If I'm not mistaken, I believe William of Occam was a theist, also.